626 authors. 23 listed as authors and linked to their Wikidata items. And 603 author name strings that don't link to anything. I'm going to start going through it with Author Disambiguator (I know, I lead a very exciting life), but it's gonna take a while, and it's got me thinking about priorities.

I haven't, I usually start with the author and make sure they have an item and then change articles (if I'm reading it right this would start with an article and edit the name strings), but that's interesting. I'll think about it, thanks!

It's a fun (especially on a cold rainy night) cleanup project that helps improve Wikidata and I can do while I'm watching a movie, and while a lot people like creating new items there's a lot to be said for improving existing items.

Thanks to everyone who worked on author disambiguator and fin!

They can be graphed because the metadata for articles she co-authored are *linked* to her Wikidata item. Because author disambiguator replaced the text strings in the Wikidata item for the article with her Wikidata item. It put the "linked" in linked data.

And to paraphrase Greg Proops, that's when this shit takes off. Check out Karen Collins on Scholia now: scholia.toolforge.org/author/Q5967...

Those topics, venue stats, that big swirly co-author graph (people love the big swirly co-author graph) etc. aren't being pulled directly from her WD item.

*And* author information is now linked because articles are now linked to the author items and any statements they include. Prior to this article items were probably linked to a journal title, but that was probably about it for linked data. Now it's part of a big juicy metadata web.

Here's a Scholia link to an article I used author disambig to replace name strings with Wikidata items for: scholia.toolforge.org/work/Q117422...

Which, okay, that's nice enough. But the point to me isn't the individual article I'm working from. It's that I'm also catching a lot of other articles.

Then you select the articles by the author you're working on, select the author (it provides a list of similar names) and it generates statements to automatically replace the text string in the article Wikidata item with the Wikidata item for the author. And your linked data is now more linked.

Things like co-authors, journal published in, etc. If a name keeps showing up in the same journal with the same co-authors on the same topic, it's likely it's the same person. And you can always check to make sure (links to ORCIDs are great for this, or going to the article for the author info).

Enter author disambiguator. You plug in a name, and it looks for name strings and clusters them (this is all explained fully with examples in the link above). You identify (or create) a Wikidata item for an author, and select articles with that name based on provided contextual metadata.

In other words for items about articles where author names are text strings, that "linked data" ain't linked because the import process doesn't know which "Jane Smith" Wikidata item to use. And a lot of people doing batch imports don't take the time to go back and do anything about that.

But when you pull in the author names it's going to be just a text string not linked to the authors' Wikidata items (if they even have one). It's better than nothing, but since you can automate import of text string names, there are a LOT of articles with text strings for author names.